


'What Do You Mean "Pleasure," White Man?': Complicating Empathetic Identification and Self-Insertion in Online Fan Fiction

by Ithiliana



Series: Ithiliana's Academic Presentations [2]
Category: House M.D., Psych (TV 2006)
Genre: House - Freeform, M/M, Meta, Psych - Freeform, Race, Slash, fan fiction, reception
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25966105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ithiliana/pseuds/Ithiliana
Summary: This paper is based on the theory that all fan productions exist within a dense network of relationships between texts, creators, and audiences that center on various pleasures relating to empathetic identification, that is, the desire to identify with and enter into the world of the text (whether book, film, television, game, or graphic novel). However, empathetic identification and self-insertion are complicated in multiple ways when fans are not positioned as privileged within the dominant system of race and thus experience the pleasures and pains of empathetic identification and of self-insertion in a capitalist, corporate media culture which has a history of excluding, marginalizing, whitewashing, and stereotyping people of color.
Relationships: Burton "Gus" Guster & Shawn Spencer, Carlton Lassiter/Shawn Spencer, Eric Foreman/Greg House, Greg House/James Wilson, Robert Chase & Greg House
Series: Ithiliana's Academic Presentations [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1884643
Comments: 10
Kudos: 9





	'What Do You Mean "Pleasure," White Man?': Complicating Empathetic Identification and Self-Insertion in Online Fan Fiction

**Author's Note:**

> Background: I retired from my academic job in June 2020 with a whole lot of WIPS (academic and fic projects, and often academic projects on fic!), so I've decided to post the presentations that never got developed into a larger projects (and aren't likely to be developed at this point) as meta in AO3. These presentations will be grouped in a series although they will deal with a variety of topics.
> 
> I am editing them lightly (correcting surface errors or syntax errors that I failed to notice the first time around); other than those edits, they are the same as the papers I presented in the past. 
> 
> I'm listing the original presentation information, along with my passport name, which I've always been fairly open about, because, RETIRED! 
> 
> The paper was written in 2010 and presented at a conference, _Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards an Erotics of Reception_ , held at the University of Bristol, UK. July 10, 2010.
> 
> I submitted it the following year for consideration for a themed issue on "Race and Ethnicity in Fandom" I was co-editing with Sarah Gatson Transformative Works and Cultures. The paper was rejected by an anonymous peer reviewer on the grounds that anything about racism in fandom required more data from more fandoms.

[0.1] Abstract - This paper is based on the theory that all fan productions exist within a dense network of relationships between texts, creators, and audiences that center on various pleasures relating to empathetic identification, that is, the desire to identify with and enter into the world of the text (whether book, film, television, game, or graphic novel). However, empathetic identification and self-insertion are complicated in multiple ways when fans are not positioned as privileged within the dominant system of race and thus experience the pleasures and pains of empathetic identification and of self-insertion in a capitalist, corporate media culture which has a history of excluding, marginalizing, whitewashing, and stereotyping people of color. My work in this pilot project analyzes pairing patterns found in archived fan fictions written about two U.S. television shows ( _Psych_ and _House_ ). While the two chosen television shows feature major characters who are African American, the fan fiction choices of a predominantly white female fandom tend to default to writing white characters. In the slash fan writing community, where most stories focus on romantic and sexual relationships between male characters, the marginalization of the major characters of color has been commented upon in the fandom. This paper is concerned with online media fandoms with diverse populations, a diversity that seems to be largely unrecognized or unacknowledged by either academics doing fan studies scholarship or the fans themselves.

[0.2] Keywords: Fan fiction, Race, _Psych_ , _House_ , Slash, Reception

[0.2] Acknowledgements: I owe thanks to a number of people for their support with this project: Queenzulu and Zvi, in particular, and, more generally, my friends list/reading circles on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. Ika Willis, Anna Wilson, and Balaka Basu as well as the other participants at the 2010 Desiring the Text conference held in Bristol, U.K., provided incredible feedback and support as did the IAS Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor.

[1] Introduction

[1.1] This paper is based on the premise that that all fan-created productions exist within a dense network of relationships between texts, creators, and audiences that center on various pleasures relating to empathetic identification, that is, the desire to identify with and enter into the world of a text (whether book, film, television, game, or graphic novel). As a result, all fan-created productions rely to different degrees upon some form of self-insertion. While I focus today on fan fiction, I would argue this approach could apply equally to analyses of fan videos, art, costuming, and filk songs. However, empathetic identification and self-insertion are complicated in multiple ways when fans are not positioned as privileged within the dominant system of race and thus experience the pleasures and pains of empathetic identification and of self-insertion in a capitalist, corporate media culture which has a history of excluding, marginalizing, whitewashing, and stereotyping people of color.

[1.2] My work analyzes pairing patterns found in archived fan fictions written about two U.S. television shows ( _Psych_ and _House_ ). While the two chosen television shows feature major characters who are African American, the fan fiction choices of a predominantly white female fandom tend to default to writing white characters. In the slash fan writing community, where most stories focus on romantic and sexual relationships between male characters, the marginalization of the major characters of color has been commented upon in the fandom. This paper is concerned with online media fandoms with diverse populations, a diversity that seems to be largely unrecognized or unacknowledged by either academics doing fan studies scholarship or the fans themselves. My method is a type of content analysis of the pairings of fan fictions archived in multi-fiction archives and fandom-specific communities on a social networking site (Live Journal). By pairings I mean which two characters are paired in a romantic and/or sexual relationship in the fans' stories. At this point, my data show that fans (who are not necessarily white) who read and write the white character pairings in these two fandoms have a greater number and range of stories through which they can experience various pleasures relating to empathetic identification and entering into the world of the texts than do the fans who read and write the inter-racial character pairings. This early work, which looks at a small number fan fiction sites, indicates that a larger comparative analysis which can test the results found here is necessary. Future work could include more fandom communities and more categories of content with more statistical sophistication.

[2] Theory and Methodology

[2.1] I use both queer theory and critical race theory to form an intersectional approach designed to explore communities in online fandoms constructed around two currently running television shows: _Psych_ (USA) and _House_ _M.D_. (Fox). Despite the differences in genre (comedy vs. drama), both have a significant fandom presence on the internet; both fit the pattern established by 1970s shows from which slash originated. Shows such as _Star Trek, Blakes 7, The Professionals, the Man from Uncle, Starsky and Hutch_ ) predominantly featured male protagonists, often partners, in action genres (Pugh). While _House_ is a medical show, it is widely known to be based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. _House_ has much larger cast than does _Psych_ ; the larger number of characters result in a greater number of potential pairings being available for fans to write about. Both fandoms do have fans writing about heterosexual relationships, but my focus in this paper is the slash area of the fandoms, those focusing on male/male relationships that are not shown in the canon (source) text.

[2.2] While fan fiction studies have been immediately and centrally concerned with questions of gender from the start because of the dominance of white women writing fan fiction, constructions of sexuality, race and ethnicity, and class have not yet become as important a focus. With few exceptions, such as Sarah L. Gatson and Abigail De Kosnik, fan scholars fail to deal critically with race in their work on fan productions.[i] Earlier fan studies scholarship analyzed fan productions based on the 1970s shows, and for some time fan studies scholarship relied upon Henry Jenkins' characterization in _Textual Poachers_ of women (default: white, straight, middle-class, cisgender) who write their (romance) narratives into the world of action media, but this understanding of fan productions, especially fan fiction, has changed. More recent scholarship, often focusing on online fandoms, notes the presence of queer fans present and out in fandoms. As Ika Willis argues in "Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space For Mary Sue at Hogwarts," "[r]ecent scholarship on fan fiction --largely responding to the mainly celebratory work of writers such as Henry Jenkins and Camille Bacon-Smith--has tended to be oriented about the incorporation/resistance paradigm" (154). The problem with the incorporation/resistance paradigm (which is related to the binary construction of fans as either passive consumers or as active resisters) is that, as a binary, it tends to simplify the categories of fan fiction into "normal/deviant" so that the normal heterosexual narrative is changed by the deviant slashers/fans into something that is "not normal." Drawing on arguments made by Sara Gwenllian Jones, Willis argues that it is possible to conceptualize slash as making an existing element of the text visible. Willis calls for further development away from the binary paradigm, the development of more complex and, in Roland Barthes' term, "thick" models of reading fan fiction that complicate other binaries. One binary which Willis wishes to complicate is the construct of surface vs. deep meanings. Another is the conflation of author and text leading to the tendency to define the queerness of texts by the identities of authors, thus limiting the ability to "account for the complex circulation of desire and gender and texts and subjectivities, or for the ways in which an author's self-positioning correspond to her identification with characters in canon." As a result, Willis calls for a focus on "gaps," arguing that elements such as queerness or resistance are neither the "inherent property of a text, but neither [are they]…inherent" properties of readers (155). I believe Willis' model of reading need not be restricted solely to the area of sexualities but has implications for reading texts by fans of color.

[2.3] I am a white and queer woman; I am a fairly regular viewer of _Psych,_ less so of _House_. I do not participate in either fandom, although I know a number of fans of both shows through interactions on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, both important social networking sites for groups of fans. While my primary fandom is _Lord of the Rings_ , in recent years, since about 2007, I have become involved in a number of intersectional and critical race discussions in online media fandom that involve work being done with regard to race/racisms in fandom. So while I am not an insider-participant in either fandom, I am a participatant in an area of fandom that crosses specific fan source lines (i.e. shows, books, films), to focus on analyzing race, gender, etc. in the fan sources, in fan fiction, and in fandom as a community.[ii] As a result reading the meta (essays) posted in the fans' journals, I became aware of the extent to which some fans of color were frustrated by the fan fiction produced in their fandoms. The frustration involved not only the respective number of fan fictions produced but the difference in number of comments received; fan authors find great pleasure in receiving comments from the community. Both shows feature important African American characters: Burton Guster (Gus), in _Psych_ , is the friend of Shawn Spencer, the pretend psychic, of the show; they have been friends since childhood, and episodes open with a flashback to a childhood memory linked to the themes of the episodes. Despite the importance of these two characters, the perception in fandom is that there were relatively few stories in the slash area of the fandom focusing on the interracial pairing. My surprise at this perception, since I could clearly see how the relationship between Gus and Shawn fit neatly within slash conventions, led to this research.

[2.4] I do not expect this paper to be the definitive or final word on the topic. Rather, I am hoping to encourage more scholarship by beginning a dialogue in academic spaces about the work already being done in fan spaces. Complex models of reading such as Willis' do not ignore the identities of writers and readers engaged in the creation and consumption of productions eliciting the complex spectrum of pleasures including self-insertion and empathetic identification. But what does it mean to insert oneself, as a reader and writer, into a world that is constructed from and constructs in its turn stereotypes reflecting the attitudes of the dominant culture? Scholarship on slash fiction reveals what some women have done in response to the dominance of media by primarily white men, the question of its meaning for fans/viewer of color who enter into entertainment that replicates racism and to interact in the largely but not entirely white fandoms on the internet is as of yet largely unexplored.

[2.5] This project examines the context that exists in selected fan fiction archives against which the fans of color work, fans who are in Willis' terms "reorienting" and supplementing (in Brecht's meaning of the word) canonical texts as well as "negotiating the 'painful gaps' left in the encounter between a reader's 'felt desire' and the read text" (155; 158; 166) in multiple ways online. In the context of my project, "the read text" must be understood as applying not only to the source texts (television shows) but also the fan fiction produced by fans in the fandoms. So the "gaps" become multiplied: there are the readers of the source text, the writers of the fan text, the readers of the fan text who may also be fan writers. There can even be readers of the fan text who did not view the source text. Many fan texts are written to fill gaps that the writer perceives in the source text, but of course the fan texts can have, must have, their own gaps. One of the most predominant gaps in texts concerns constructions of race beyond whiteness. 

[2.6] My critical race theory is drawn from Wendy Chun's monograph, _Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics_. She argues that, despite the early utopian marketing promises made by corporations, people participating in online communities do not leave their races or racisms behind. She analyzes a number of computer and telecommunications commercials to show that the utopian promise of the internet was grounded on the belief in an essential construction of race: words in commercials promised users "escape" from the problems of race, of flesh, of gender, of age, of or of disability. As Chun argues, what was being sold was not truly freedom from discrimination, but the chance, if one wished, to pass as an unmarked white male. The claim that marked bodies cannot be "seen," that is, are invisible, in a text-only environment is based on as essentialist belief that difference is carried only by and on the body, as opposed to a sociolinguistic belief that culture, including the constructions of race, is created and embodied in part through language. White fans can too easily share the beliefs, but the past decade on fandom activities on the internet includes refusals of fans of color to "pass," and to allow unchallenged and uncritiqued racist assumptions, attitudes, language, and behaviors to pass, whether racist behaviors are embedded in the source texts or performed by other fans.

[2.7] One of the problems reported by fans of color is how invisible they are to white fans. This invisibility is perhaps linked to the assumption in pre-internet book and con-based sf fandom that fans attend cons. This invisibility or lack of fans of color was considered a problem, at least by some. As reported on the "About" section of the Carl Brandon Society webpage, "Carl Joshua Brandon was a fictional black fan writer invented by white writers Terry Carr and Peter Graham in the fifties" (http://www.carlbrandon.org/about.html>. This hoax lasted two years. The Carl Brandon Society was begun in 1999, growing out of discussions by fans and writers of color in science fiction/fantasy (including Samuel R. Delany, Jr.) to "increase racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction". In online fandom, a number of communities, archives, and events (such as festivals and challenges) have been created over the past ten or more years. Communities might focus on discussion racism in the media (Deadbrowalking, created in 2002), or might focus on activist attempts to shape casting decisions or affect public discussion of the media (Racebending, created 2009). Other communities focus on creating a space for fan fiction featuring characters of color (FanficofColor, 2007; Bob the Haitian, 2007). Some communities are fandom specific; others, like "Remember Us"(2002) is a multi-fandom, multi-genre archive for all or any fanfiction multi fandom, all genres, as long as story focuses on characters of color, whether single or as "significant parts of ensemble cast." These are only a few examples of the spaces in which ongoing discussions by fans of color are taking place, spaces dedicated to anti-racist work, activism, education, and support going back at least a decade online.

[2.8] I would argue that writing stories about characters of color, which is one important element of the anti-racist work, does not work in isolation because the process is not as simple as "write more of what you want" (a comment often addressed to people who point out the exclusions and marginalizations in literature and media). In fact, the fans of color are writing what they want, but that does not change the impact of the behaviors of the dominant group on fandom as a whole. That is why my focus in this paper is on the general fandom community archives and LJ communities (which can be presumed to reflect the majority white demographic of fandom).[iii]

[3] Canon and Fanon

[3.1] _Psych_ is a comedy and police procedural set in Santa Barbara, California. The show features two main characters: Shawn Spencer (played by James Roday) is the son of a police officer. Shawn works with his childhood friend, Burton Guster (played by Dulé Hill) to help the police solve crimes by pretending to have psychic abilities. _House, M.D_. is a medial drama, with Hugh Laurie playing Dr. Gregory House who works with a diagnostic team at a New Jersey hospital. The show has a larger ensemble of characters than _Psych,_ reflecting the staff at a large hospital as well as House's diagnostic team which has changed over the years its been in production. The characters receiving the most attention in fandom seem to be two of the women (Cuddy and Cameron), and three of the men (Wilson, Chase, and Foreman), often in the context of romantic and sexual relationships with House.

[3.2] The major actors' ethnic backgrounds do not necessarily match those of their characters: James Rhoday is James David Rodriguez' stage name; he is Mexican American, although his character in the show is presented as white, with his parents being played by Corbin Bernsen and Cybill Shepherd. Hill's parents are from Jamaica, and his full name is Karim Dulé Hill; Gus's parents are played by Bill Guster and Phylicia Rashad; their family seems to be presented as African American. The back-story of the show presents Shawn and Gus as friends from childhood; each episode starts with a flashback that connects thematically to the main story arc. The two men work together, despite Gus having a paying job, and fans regularly describe them as married.

[3.3] _House_ , by contrast, is more of an ensemble cast, with a number of major secondary characters existing in relationship to the single main character, Gregory House, played by British actor Hugh Laurie. Because of House's personality and addiction, most of those characters tend to fall into some sort of care-taking role, with one exception: Dr. Eric Foreman, played by Omar Epps, the major character of color on the show. Omar Epps is an African American actor, singer, and songwriter. Foreman is shown as challenging House's authority on multiple occasions, and he was part of the diagnostic team during the first three seasons of the show. His narrative arc involves him quitting because he can no longer work for House, but being unable to keep/find work in other hospitals, and so having to return to work with House. The canon relationship between the two men is one in which House makes racist jokes while claiming that Foreman is very much like House in intelligence and the tendency to challenge authority while Foreman resists the comparison although over time, he is shown as acting more like House.

[3.4] Both shows embody a number of conventions that play well in slash writing communities: _Psych_ is a buddy show; the two main characters have very different personalities, with one falling more into the responsible caretaking role. It is possible to name half a dozen shows similar to _Psych_ in which the two main characters are white, and for which the OTP (One True Pairing) for the majority of the slash fandom are the two main characters. The fact that the fanfiction for _Psych_ , despite the show's conforming to so many slash tropes, does not follow that pattern has been questioned by some fans of color from the start. _House_ shows a charged and competitive, at times negative, relationship between House and Foreman, another trope that is popular in slash fandom. Add the perception that Foreman is the character seen as most like House, and the result is an antagonistic relationship that many fans enjoy rewriting as characters who are relucant to succumb to their passionate attraction when the two characters are white.

[3.5] For this pilot project, I chose two types of internet fan fiction communities: two multi-fandom archives (Fanfiction.net., Archive of Our Own) which are not specific to a single fandom, and LiveJournal communities dedicated to specific shows and/or pairings and characters. Fanfiction.net is the oldest and largest of fan archives. It sets few restrictions on submissions (the primary limits are no adult rated stories and no real people fic). It is widely perceived as more democratic in sense of accessibility while perhaps having less quality writing overall because of that accessibility. The Archive of Our Own, which is relatively new, is smaller than Fanfiction.net, but represents the cutting edge in fan fiction archives, its code created from scratch by an open source team consisting mostly of women.[iv] LiveJournal is a social networking site that allows the creation of communities for multiple purposes; many fan communities for sharing fiction and other fan productions have existed on LiveJournal for years. My search methodology used existing tools: the archives have their own search functions (Archive of Our Own more sophisticated than Fanfiction.net), and I used the pairing names as my primary search focus, then I did Google searches based on pairing names and a site restriction on LiveJournal.

[3.6]. I first searched for the total number of stories in each fandom, on each site, then searched by pairing. In Fanfiction.net and the LiveJournal communities, I had to search by both iterations of the pairing names (Shawn/Gus and Gus/Shawn, for example), but that was not necessary in the Archive of our Own. The results of that search are seen in Table 1. The results were unexpected with regard to Fanfiction.net. In _Psych_ fandom, the fact that Shawn/Gus and Gus/Shawn fics (there is overlap) made up 51% of the stories on Fanfiction.net surprised some of the fans I discussed this project with. What they had expected to see from their experiences in LiveJournal was a clear majority of Shawn/Lassiter stories (Lassiter being a white police officer who serves as an antagonist to Shawn). Since the Livejournal searches show only 8% of the total stories are Shawn/Gus, the fans are correct in their assessment of LiveJournal, but both Fanfiction.net and The Archive of Our Own are different. The Archive of Our Own, although having a much smaller number of stories, has 53% about Shawn/Gus. The _House_ fandom is different than the _Psych_ fandom; in Fanfiction.net, House/Chase clearly dominant (61% of all stories ). While House/Wilson is much more dominant in AO3 (71%), LiveJournal does not show any significant differences between the two white pairings. However, the individual community analysis (Table 2) reveals that my search method for LiveJournal was limited; I suspect the problem is that LiveJournal allows people to post in both their personal journals as well as in community journals. As a result, a single story might be posted in half a dozen places, and some people post only in their journals as opposed to archives.

**Table 1. Basic Pairing Information by Site**

**PAIRING**

| 

**Fanfiction.net**

| 

**LiveJournal**

| 

**Archive of Our Own**  
  
---|---|---|---  
  
**Psych (total)**

| 

**1729**

| 

**50,400**

| 

**149**  
  
Shawn/Gus

| 

**888 | 51%**

| 

**4070 | 8%**

| 

**80 | 53%**  
  
Gus/Shawn

| 

442

| 

3640  
  
Shawn/Lassiter

| 

**455 | 26%**

| 

**5710 | 11%**

| 

**72 | 48%**  
  
Lassiter/Shawn

| 

241

| 

2580  
  
**House, M.D. (total)**

| 

**17,805**

| 

**113,000**

| 

**988**  
  
Foreman/House

| 

**226 | 12%**

| 

**7549 | 6%**

| 

**165 | 16%**  
  
House/Foreman

| 

225

| 

7670  
  
House/Wilson

| 

**3856 | 22%**

| 

**19,200 | 17%**

| 

**701 | 71%**  
  
Wilson/house

| 

3856

| 

13,700  
  
House/Chase

| 

**1092 | 61%**

| 

**12,300 | 10%**

| 

**227 | 23%**  
  
Chase/House

| 

1090

| 

11,800  
  
[3.7] Table 2 compares LiveJournal communities, listing data gleaned primarily from the LJ profile pages (in May 2010): this data includes name of the community, when it was created, the total number of members (who can post in the community) the number of people watching (members as well as non-members who have the community on their friends' list). The show/multiple character communities are the oldest, which is a pattern in fandom, with the character or pairing specific communities following. In both fandoms, the interracial pairing communities were established last (four years after the multiple character community in the case of Foreman_House, one year in the case of Shawn_Gus). Since all the communities are open to different types of postings (art, discussion, videos), the number of entries do not correlate with fan fiction, but at this stage, I am primarily interested in the level of activity shown by entries and comments on those entries. The House_Wilson community is clearly the most active, even more than the House_Slash community, both in terms of membership, postings, and commenting.

**Table 2: Specific LiveJournal Communities**

**LJ COMMUNITY**

| 

**CREATED**

| 

**MEMBERSHIP**

| 

**WATCHED BY**

| 

**ENTRIES**

| 

**COMMENTS**  
  
---|---|---|---|---|---  
  
**Foreman_House**

| 

**4/1/2008**

| 

**57**

| 

**57**

| 

**119**

| 

**39**  
  
**House_Wilson**

| 

**4/11/2005**

| 

**4619**

| 

**3619**

| 

**15,222**

| 

**196,303**  
  
House_Chase

| 

5/6/2005

| 

1254

| 

1004

| 

2122

| 

10,633  
  
House_Slash

| 

3/2/2005

| 

2170

| 

1626

| 

3578

| 

14,097  
  
**Shawn and Gus**

| 

**12/23/2007**

| 

**238**

| 

**235**

| 

**130**

| 

**522**  
  
Shawn_Lassiter

| 

8/28/2006

| 

841

| 

not given/allowed

| 

862

| 

2606  
  
Psych Slash 

| 

7/17/2006

| 

1404

| 

not given/allowed

| 

1807

| 

14,323  
  
[3.8] Table 3 compares average activity. Since the communities were created at different times and have different numbers of members, the table shows the the average entries (per month), the average entries per member, the average comments by month, and the average comments by member. There can be comments from people who are not members of the community, and, statistics posted by people tracking the difference between hits and comments in archives and journals show that a large majority of people who at least click on stories do not leave comments. While Shawn and Gus had the smallest average of entries per member (.54%), Foreman_House was the second largest (2.08), with, again, House_Wilson the most productive (3.29). Commenters on Foreman_House (.68) seem less present than on Shawn and Gus (2.19 however)! That analysis supports the basic data above: House_Wilson is more active than Foreman_House (or House_Chase), and Shawn_Lassiter is more active than Shawn_Gus.

**Table 3: Average comments/activity in the pairing specific communities**

**LJ COMMUNITY**

| 

**AGE COM**

| 

**AV ENT/MO**

| 

**AV ENT/MEM**

| 

**AV COM/MO**

| 

**AV COM/MEM**  
  
---|---|---|---|---|---  
  
**Foreman_House**

| 

**25 months**

| 

**4.76**

| 

**2.08**

| 

**1.56**

| 

**0.68**  
  
**House_Wilson**

| 

**61 months**

| 

**249.54**

| 

**3.29**

| 

**3210.08**

| 

**42.49**  
  
House_Chase

| 

60 months

| 

84.81

| 

1.68

| 

177.21

| 

8.49  
  
House_Slash

| 

63 months

| 

57.00

| 

1.64

| 

223.76

| 

6.49  
  
**Shawn and Gus**

| 

**29 months**

| 

**4.48**

| 

**0.54**

| 

**18**

| 

**2.19**  
  
**Shawn_Lassiter**

| 

**45 months**

| 

**19.15**

| 

**1.02**

| 

**57.91**

| 

**3.09**  
  
Psych Slash

| 

44 months

| 

41.06

| 

1.28

| 

325.52

| 

10.2  
  
[3.9] I then looked at the memories of the multi-character communities (memories are a LiveJournal means of tagging). I did not try to check if there was a significant number of posts without a memory tag. Within Psych_Slash and House_Slash, the white/white character pairing is dominant: 534 Shawn/Lassiter compared to 87 Shawn/Gus; 472 House/Wilson compared to 6 House/Foreman.

 **Table 4 Comparison of Memories (pairings) in all-fandom (HOUSE AND PSYCH SLASH)**

**MEMORIES**

**PSYCH-SLASH**

| 

**MEMORIES**

**HOUSE-SLASH**  
  
---|---  
  
**Pairing**

| 

**Number**

| 

**Pairing**

| 

**Number**  
  
Gus/Other

| 

16

| 

Chase/Foreman

| 

30  
  
Lassiter/Other

| 

7

| 

House/Chase

| 

99  
  
**Lassiter/Shawn**

| 

**534**

| 

House/Foreman

| 

6  
  
Shawn/Gus

| 

87

| 

**House/Wilson**

| 

**472**  
  
Shawn/Other

| 

15

| 

Wilson/Chase

| 

26  
  
Other Pairings

| 

17

| 

Wilson/Foreman

| 

1  
  
676

| 

634  
  
[3.10] The numbers show that the communities for the white pairings are much larger (and, in the multiple character communities, more popular as shown by the tags) than interracial pairings. The membership is much larger in the white/white character communities although I am sure overlap in members exists. A comparison of names of members and watchers of the communities would show what percentage of overlap. Some fans focus more on a single pairing/relationship; others enjoy reading their favorite character or characters with more than one partner. It is notable that the LiveJournal community with the largest membership is House_Wilson, not House_Slash, explaining why so many of the people I know on LJ assumed that House_Wilson was the dominant pairing. I did not even think to search for House/Chase until someone on my LiveJournal prompted me. Not surprisingly the community with the largest number of entries and comments is also House_Wilson.

[4] Conclusion

[4.1] There are many reasons why people are active or inactive in fandom or in a community; my intent in this brief discussion does not attempt to address the motivations of individual fans. What any one fan enjoys in a show or chooses to write is not significant; what might be significant are the larger patterns. This early work, which looks at a small number of fan fiction sites, indicates that a larger comparative analysis is necessary. Future work would include more fandom communities and more categories of content. With the exception of the disparity between archives and LiveJournal in the _Psych_ results, I was not terribly surprised by what I found. The data supports the perceptions fans of color report. I did not doubt their perceptions, but white fans, as is the case with any dominant group, tend to resist the perception of their social or numerical dominance as being significant or as playing a part in their sense of interactions in a community. At the least, my data show that fans (who are not necessarily all white) who read and write the white character pairings in these two fandoms arguably have a greater number and range of stories through which they can experience various pleasures relating to empathetic identification and entering into the world of the text(s). They also have a larger community of like-minded fans who share their interest in specific characters and pairings.

Works Cited

Eglash, Ron. "Race, Sex, and Nerds." _Social Text._ Summer 2002, 20.2, 49-65.

Chun, Wendy. _Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics_. MIT Press, 2006.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. _Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture_. New York: Routledge.

Karlsson, Lena. "Desperately Seeking Sameness: The processes and pleasures of identification in women's diary blog reading." _Feminist Media Studies_ Vol.7 No 2, 2007. 137-153.

Pugh, Sheenagh. _The Democratic Genre: Fanfiction in a Literary Context_. Seren Press, 2005.

Willis, Ika. "Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts" In _Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet_ , ed. Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, 153-70. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.

http://archiveofourown.org/

http://community.livejournal.com/foreman_house/profile

http://community.livejournal.com/house_wilson/profile

http://community.livejournal.com/shawn_gus/profile

http://community.livejournal.com/shawn_lassiter/

http://community.livejournal.com/psych_slash/profile

http://www.fanfiction.net/

[i] Some scholarship on race and the internet/online communities does exist, primarily from sociological, psychological, media studies. Lena Karlsson, "Desperately Seeking Sameness: The processes and pleasures of identification in women's diary blog reading," from Feminist Media Studies. Two articles on "nerdness" and race are of interest because of the extent to which fans self-identify as nerds (with gender differences acknowledged between male and female nerds): "Race, Sex and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian-American hipsters," Dr. Ron Eglash in Social Text (sociology? check) analyzes the cultural intersections of race and "nerd," to critique "reversing" stereotypes. Eglash incorporates gender analysis.

[ii] My fandom pseudonym is Ithiliana. I am relatively open in both academic fandom studies circle and, most importantly, in fandom since I do scholarship on fan fiction and critical race issues. I try to always distinguish when I am interacting as a fan, and when I am working on a scholarly project by explicit framing in my LiveJournal and Dreamwidth Journal, including posting about the Institutional Review Board review of my projects when they involve interaction with and the study of human subjects. In this case, because the project involves only the analysis of the numbers of stories in various public archives and communities, I did not seek IRB review or ask permission since I was not linking to an individual fan's story.

[iii] LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, unlike blogs, give journal users and community owners/moderators a great deal of control over who can read the content. A journal/community may be open to all or locked to a specific filter which can range from the entire membership/friends list to specifically chosen smaller groups on specific filters. Many communities created by fans of color for discussion with fans of color are closed to create safer spaces, and membership is carefully moderated.

[iv] The Archive of our Own is one of a number of projects supported by the Organization of Transformative Works which also supports the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures.


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